Development of an advanced design process for profiled edge laminated tooling

The design and fabrication of tools for manufacturing represents one of the most time consuming and costly phases in the development of new products. Tooling development often accounts for 30% of the total manufacturing costs. New realities of the product market require faster product development and reduced time to market. To reduce the time and cost of the product development and manufacturing processes, the new technologies of Rapid Prototyping (RP) and Rapid Tooling (RT), which have been developed over the last two decades, offer the potential to completely revolutionize the process of manufacturing. To enable performance validation in design stage, prototypes must be produced using the same material and production process as will be used in full-scale production. RT naturally evolved from RP technologies due to the need to produce higher quantities of models in a wider variety of materials. Therefore, it has been recognized that RT could offer significant cost and time savings in the tooling area. One type of RT technology is known as laminated tooling.; Many other researchers have investigated manufacturing with laminated tools, but currently it is an underutilized technology, especially for large part applications. To facilitate adoption of this RT method by industry, a design process for PEL Tooling has been developed. Profiled Edge Laminated (PEL) tooling is a promising laminated tooling method involving the assembly of an array of laminations whose top edges are simultaneously profiled and beveled based on a CAD model of the intended tool surface. Unfortunately, the design process of PEL tooling is still very much of a black art. A new advanced design process for PEL Tooling is proposed based on other prior work focused on the tooling fabrication process. The main goal of this research is to develop the advanced design process for PEL Tooling, i.e., the required synthesis and analysis tools, and methodologies for designing PEL tools. The advanced PEL Tooling design process will allow manufacturing engineers and tooling designers to design a PEL tool, predict its structural and thermal behavior, and optimize it (i.e., modify tool shape, lamination orientations and thicknesses) before it must be fabricated. The resulting design process will be demonstrated by completely developing a simple industrial PEL tool based on a CAD part shape.